IPP Summit Speaker Bios

 


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Jack Breese is a Director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where he oversees work on intelligent systems, including data management, machine learning, natural language processing, communities, document understanding, and adaptive systems. Previously, Breese was a founding member of the Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems research group at Microsoft Research, which developed basic technologies and tools for user modeling, intelligent diagnostics, adaptive systems and data mining. His other contributions at Microsoft include development of the Office Assistant in Microsoft Office and troubleshooters deployed by Microsoft Technical Support on the Web and in Windows-based products. Breese received a doctorate from Stanford University in 1987 and joined Microsoft Research in 1993.


John Seely Brown is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center at USC. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation until April 2002 and also director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) until June 2000-a position he held for twelve years. While head of PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, complex adaptive systems, microelectrical mechanical system (MEMS), and nanotechnology. His personal research interests include digital culture and rich media (both of which he pursues at USC), innovation-both technological and institutional, Web service architectures, and organizational and individual learning.

Brown is a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the AAAI and of AAAS, and a Trustee of Brown University and the MacArthur Foundation. He serves on numerous boards of directors and advisory boards. He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review's McKinsey Award in 1991 for his article "Research that Reinvents the Corporation" and again in 2002 for his article (with John Hagel) "Your Next IT Strategy." In 1997 he published Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation (Harvard Business Review Books). He was an executive producer of the award-winning film "Art " Lunch " Internet " Dinner," which won a bronze medal at Worldfest 1994, the Charleston International Film Festival. He received the 1998 Industrial Research Institute Medal for outstanding accomplishments in technological innovation and the 1999 Holland Award in recognition of the best paper published in Research Technology Management in 1998. With Paul Duguid, he co-authored the acclaimed book The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000, 2nd edition 2002), which has been translated into nine languages.

Brown received a BA from Brown University in 1962 in mathematics and physics and a PhD from University of Michigan in 1970 in computer and communication sciences. In 2000, Brown University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science Degree. The London Business School awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Science in Economics in July 2001. He is an avid reader, traveler and motorcyclist. Part scientist, part designer, and part strategist, Brown's views are unique. His ideas are distinguished by a broad view of the human contexts in which technologies operate and a healthy skepticism about whether or not change always represents genuine progress.


Per-Kristian Halvorsen is an expert on the management of innovation and technology. He is an HP vice president and the Director of the Solutions and Services Research Center (SSRC) at HP Labs, HP's central research and development organization. At the SSRC, Halvorsen built a new R&D capability to automate complex, labor-intensive services businesses, thus providing a technology-based alternative to moving these activities offshore to locations with low-cost labor. Halvorsen is also recognized for his efforts in the use of information technology to further economic development. In 2002, he established the first research lab dedicated to the discovery and design of IT for the world's emerging economies. Prior to joining HP in 2000, Dr. Halvorsen worked for 17 years as a Lab Director and a scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he started the Intelligent Information Access research program with Dr. Stu Card. This program gave rise to many key technologies used today in Web search and retrieval. He has held teaching or research positions at MIT, Oslo University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Halvorsen has been a member of the board of directors of the Symantec Corporation and is currently a director of the Autodesk Corporation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee on "Internet Navigation and the Domain Name System."

Halvorsen received his Ph. D. in theoretical linguistics from the University of Texas. He lives in Los Altos Hills, California, with his wife, Dr. Meg Withgott, and their 14-year-old son.


Saul Kaplan is the Director of Business Development for the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. He has responsibility for the Corporation's business expansion, retention, and acquisition activities. He also oversees Small Business Services and Government Procurement and Workforce Development.

Prior to joining the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, Mr. Kaplan was a Senior Strategy Partner in Accenture's Health & Life Science practice. He has worked broadly throughout the pharmaceutical, medical products, and biotechnology industry. His work with senior industry executives has concentrated on the design and implementation of global capabilities to bring the right products to market faster and to increase profitability from existing products. His goal is to ensure that conceptual goals are translated into realistic implementations.

Prior to his career in management consulting, Mr. Kaplan worked for the Pharmaceutical Division of Eli Lilly and Company. As a Marketing Plans Manager he was responsible for the launch strategy and plan for the successful introduction of Prozac into the U.S. market.


John Preston is President and CEO of Atomic Ordered Materials LLC. (AOM) and Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining AOM, Mr. Preston was the Director of Technology Development at MIT, where he was responsible for the commercialization of intellectual property developed there. In this capacity he oversaw activities that led to the creation of over 250 new technologybased companies as well as the negotiation of thousands of licenses with existing companies. Many thousands of new jobs resulted from these license agreements. He also negotiated many complex agreements, including the US standard for high-definition television, while representing MIT on the HDTV Grand Alliance.

Prior appointments include director or advisory positions for the Governor of Massachusetts, the US Department of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science and Technology Board of Singapore, and several other institutions. Mr. Preston has testified seven times before the US Congress on issues related to technology commercialization and has chaired meetings on this subject for President George H. W. Bush and H.R.H. Prince Charles, among others. Mr. Preston is also a Director of Clean Harbors Corporation as well as several privately owned companies.

Mr. Preston received a BSc in physics from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA from Northwestern University. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Thomas Jefferson Award, given to the leading American in technology transfer, and the Renaissance Engineering and Science Award from Stevens Institute of Technology. President Mitterand named Mr. Preston "Knight of the National Order of Merit" of France. Mr. Preston is also an Honorary Alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (only 131 such awards have been made by MIT is its 140-year history). Mr. Preston, in 1999, received the "Hammer Award" from Vice President Gore for reinventing government; he is the only civilian to receive this award.


Alfred Z. Spector is Vice President of Services and Software in IBM Research and is responsible for IBM's worldwide services and software research. Previously, Spector was the general manager of Marketing and Strategy for IBM's AIM business, responsible for a number of IBM software product families (including CICS, WebSphere, and MQSeries), and the general manager of IBM's Transaction Systems software business. Spector was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is on the boards of the Security Industry Middleware Council and the Computing Research Association, and is Chairman of the NSF CISE Advisory Board.

Spector received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for major contributions to state-of-the-art distributed computing systems and their applications. Married and a father of three young children, Spector is an avid runner.


Robert F. Sproull, Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems, founded and led the Massachusetts branch of Sun Microsystems Laboratories for over ten years. Now he serves in a research role. Since undergraduate days, he has been building hardware and software for computer graphics, including clipping hardware, an early device-independent graphics package, page description languages, laser printing software, and window systems. He has also been involved in VLSI design, especially of asynchronous circuits and systems. Before joining Sun in 1990, he was a principal of Sutherland, Sproull & Associates, an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He is a coauthor with William Newman of the early text Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, and an author of the recently-published book Logical Effort, which deals with designing fast CMOS circuits. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.


Richard Waters received a B.S. from Brown in 1972, an M.S. from Harvard in 1973, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from MIT in 1978. For the next 13 years he worked at the MIT AI Lab as a Research Scientist and co-principal investigator of the Programmer's Apprentice project. Waters was a founding member of MERL's Research Lab in 1991. As a MERL researcher, his work centered on multi-user interactive environments for work, learning and play. He became Director of MERL's Research Lab in 1998 and CEO of MERL as a whole in 1999. In addition to his duties at MERL, Waters is currently a member of the board of directors of the Computer Research Association.